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How Should I Setup Google Plus Authorship for Service Based Companies?

I'm currently doing some research on adding Google+ Authorship to all of my service-based clients. My client's business owners are extremely marketable, but I haven't seen anyone outside of the SEO industry focus on Authorship yet. Should I be branding the company using Publisher tags and linking back to the company Google+ page, or can I add the authorship to pages of the company website in order to improve CTR's?

I have company blogs where I will be adding the authorship, so I reckon my main question is, what about the pages of the website themselves?

I've seen a lot of SEO companies focus on their Author's page while ignoring their company page. I understand that Google may want me to use the Publisher tag, but is there a reason I shouldn't use both?

4 Responses

I would use both, authorship tag is great and will also give your articles/pages a little image of the author next to the result on the SERP. From my understanding it is good for SEO to have users follow your companies site (by adding them to their circles) which is connected to your G+ page. Adding the +1 on your blogs and on your site is fine too as long as they all link to the companies Google + page.

I like the info here Donnie, thanks for the response. I actually briefly discussed this with AJ at the Garage and we really didn't come up with an answer. Should we brand the copywriter as an author? Or should we brand the CEO / Face of the company as the author?

I'm strongly leaning towards the CEO / Face of the company because I couldn't imagine my client's being happy with my Social Media Director's face showing up in their search results...does that make sense?

Thanks again, I'm just interested in this because I haven't heard much discussion around this particular question of who to brand. Maybe I'm taking it a little too serious :)

As an agency, what we do is have the author set themselves up in G+ and use rel=auth for each of their posts/pages. We employ a lot of copywriters so this is important for them, us, and client. We use either our firm or the company as rel=publisher for the individual site (depends on client and situation for us). Each author should have the site in their G+ as well. (or sites if they write to more than one). So, for a copywriter, they could have numerous sites in G+ circles.

For us, on each page of most sites, we have the FB like, G+, twit, etc. icons.

I think you're right on with the implementation side of things, my main quandary is whether my copywriters or client's CEO's should be the author. My plan (as of now) is to have my copywriters become "ghost writers" for our clients. Our copywriter's are simply cleaning up our client's information and publishing it anyway.

Have you seen your copywriter's begin to get credit for multiple articles from different websites? I'm interested in seeing if your copywriters have had success and visibility. Thanks for your response!

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